Plant Asset Management – Making the Transition to World-Class Reliability Practices

Faced with the challenges of workforce attrition, plant expansions, and reliability problems with aging equipment while continuing to provide low cost services to their customers, the City of Roseville, California, embarked on a comprehensive initiative to optimize the way they were managing and maintaining wastewater treatment plant equipment. A pilot project was initiated at a 18-million gallon/day wastewater treatment facility to demonstrate the benefits of optimizing their program on a subset of their overall asset base. By patterning their program after the practices of top-quartile maintenance and reliability performers in industries such as oil refining and chemical processing, the city was able to successfully transition a predominantly reactive and preventive maintenance approach to a condition-based approach at this facility. Most importantly, as a result of the benefits of making this transition, the City of Roseville Environmental Utilities Department is now in a better position to tackle the issues they are currently facing as well as deal with future challenges.